Chinese Competitors Research Articles

The Advancement of Electronic Gadgets in 21st Century

The 21st Century was full of innovation when it came to the Tech Sector alone, be it the introduction of the Iphone, or the launch of the big conglomerates such as Facebook and Twitter. The 21st Century gave rise to the concepts of the Curved Displays on phones and the Foldable phones. There were numerous problems which were associated with the flat screen displays, and the shortcomings have been overcome by the Curved Displays and the Foldable phones as discussed in the paper. They have revolutionized the Technological market since their launch. Many Conglomerates such as Samsung, Honor, Xiaomi have invested millions of dollars in availing this new technology. However, currently Samsung has the lead over all its Chinese competitors, and with different companies investing in the new technology, the competition is predicted to become more intense. This will surely give customers a huge variety of phones to choose from. However, this technology did not come without its drawbacks. There were multiple issues associated with the Foldable Phones such as the weight associated with the phone when folded, the tensile strength of the Foldable phones is very low, and the User Interface is not something one could get excited about. Similar issues existed with Curved Displays as well, including costly repair costs, and it is harder to get a grip on compared to the Foldable phones due to the thinning of the edges. The paper discusses in depth the shortcomings of all the types of Phones, as well as which would be the best fit for the user, along with the current trend of the users, and what the Future holds for this segment of Technology.

THE ‘WHITE GOLD RUSH’: TIBET AS A NEW FRONTLINE IN THE GLOBAL RACE FOR RENEWABLE ENERGY

While the People's Republic of China currently secures much of its lithium from countries such as Australia and Chile, a new prospecting boom is currently underway in eastern areas of Tibet. China's geologists have estimated that the region holds over 3.6 million tonnes of lithium, at least 85% of the country's total reserves. Both Tesla, the world's largest electric vehicle manufacturer, and its Chinese competitor BYD are becoming increasingly reliant on Tibet's lithium production as they expand their operations worldwide. This acceleration of lithium mining involves polluting, waste-generating and energy-intensive processing in an area known for its rich biodiversity encompassing subtropical, temperate and alpine landscapes. U.S. investor Warren Buffett's 2008 purchase of BYD shares enabled the company to exploit the Chabyer (Chinese: Zabuye) salt lake in western Tibet. The future of Elon Musk's Tesla gigafactory outside Shanghai looks increasingly dependent on access to the hard rock lithium (spodumene) deposits in mountainous eastern Tibet and its processing plants. Tibetans who express concern about the mines or protest are at risk of being killed, tortured, imprisoned and the loss of their livelihoods.

Study on the Operation Problems of Konami's Yu-Gi-Oh TCG in the Chinese Market

The market prospect for trading cards game in Japan and China is very positive. With the increasing popularity of the official Yu-Gi-Oh competitions in China and the excellent performance of Chinese competitors, Konami has gradually begun to pay attention to the Chinese market. Yu-Gi-Oh trading cards have certain commercial sales modes in China. The most important means of sales is offline store sales. And other ways are online sales, which are usually combined with offline store sales. There are also transactions with each others, but this approach carries some risks. Also, Yu-Gi-Oh has some potential challenges, the most threatening is compete with other types of trading cards, like Magic the Gathering. Yu-Gi-Oh faces some difficulties in China. Specifically, the simplified Chinese version of Yu-Gi-Oh Cards is slow to update, the market price is not stable and there is a lack of specialized stores. This paper would analyse the situation of Yu-Gi-Oh by analyzing the causes of these plights and then giving suggestions according to the situation.

Dynamics of Organizational Identification in the Wake of a Foreign Acquisition

Foreign acquisitions are perceived as threats to organizational identification. Consequently, they trigger members’ sensemaking on their relationship with the organization. Analyzing these sensemaking processes is fundamental to understanding how members interpret identity-threatening events and which logics and motives underlie their identification. We conducted interviews with 28 members of a German company that had been acquired by a Chinese competitor. The study reveals three phases of sensemaking about identification, namely assessment of uncertainty, evaluation of organizational continuity, and reassessment of the organization’s potential for self-enhancement. Initially, concerns for uncertainty reduction are prevalent. Needs for continuity, distinctiveness, and self-verification dominate continuity evaluation. In the last phase, members seek continuous self-enhancement. They hereby evaluate whether they still share the organization's ideology. Furthermore, they reassess the benefits they receive from the organization. The study constitutes a dynamic extension of identification theory. It uncovers salient identification motives and members’ causal reasoning during different sensemaking phases.

Hidden Champions in the Chinese Century: Ascent and Transformation

Hidden Champions, little-known global market leaders, are extremely important for the export performance of countries. They are a little-used source of management knowledge. No country has more Hidden Champions than Germany. After a phase of hyper globalization the Hidden Champions are facing new challenges, especially from rising Chinese competitors. They have to increase their R&D activities once again and include unfamiliar areas of knowledge in the process. They need to relocate their centers of excellence to the best place, which is often China. New drivers such as digitalization, business ecosystems and sustainability require them to adapt and open up their traditionally closed corporate cultures. This applies equally to cooperation partners and foreign environments.

Starbucks in China: what lessons can Starbucks learn from Luckin?

Theoretical basis The case integrates frameworks on business models, the business model canvas (BMC) and Porter’s generic strategies in the context of the coffee industry in China. The case enables students to construct a Business Model Canvas for competing companies, analyze the canvas to deduce the generic strategy they are pursuing, and formulate recommendations based on this analysis. Research methodology The case is derived from secondary sources, including publicly available reports and information about Starbucks and Luckin. Case overview/synopsis This case looks at Starbucks in China as it faces a fierce Chinese competitor and evolving consumer behavior. Luckin, a Chinese coffee store company, had seen explosive growth since its inception in Beijing in 2017. By late 2019, its number of brick-and-mortar locations surpassed the number of Starbucks’ coffee stores in China, which had entered the Chinese market two decades earlier in 1999. Luckin’s focused on convenience through leveraging technology and reducing costs by limiting physical stores. Although Luckin’s fortunes turned in March of 2020, after an accounting scandal came to light, Luckin’s success suggests that consumers were attracted to its positioning as a “fast coffee pickup and delivery” provider. The case describes Starbucks’ strategy in China, which it sees as an important long-term growth market. It also describes the strategic activities of fast-growing, Chinese coffee company Luckin and discusses Chinese culture and consumer behavior. Complexity academic level The case is written for undergraduate students enrolled in a business strategy or corporate entrepreneurship course. Given that the case centers on China, it could also be used in international entrepreneurship/business courses.

When can Chinese competitors catch up? Market and capability ladders and their implications for multinationals

Chinese companies have been more successful in catching up with and sometimes surpassing, their global competitors in some industries but not all of them. This holds true for markets in China and international markets. In this article, we show how both the demand and the supply sides of an industry explain these differences, in terms of the existence of market and capability ladders that can help a new competitor climb from the low end, though the middle, and to the top. We then propose several alternative strategies that multinational companies can follow to respond to growing Chinese competition and recommend strategies with the most potential for a particular market and industry.

Meeting the Challenge

Meeting the Challenge

Business model of amazon India-A case study

Amazon is an American international e-commerce company. It was started by Jeffrey P. Bezos in the year 1994. And it was launched in India in June 2013. Three years back, Amazon had no infrastructure in India, and now it dominates the Indian markets. At the very start it was perception of investors that in India It will not go long like China as in the year 2004 when Amazon entered in China it hasn't seen much success there with Alibaba, its Chinese competitor, dominating the e-commerce market. After its bad run in China, Bezos is going all in for India. Fact behind formation of Amazon in India was its huge number of headcounts i.e. 1.25 billion four times as big as the U.S.’s and more than doubles Europe's. Of these, 500 million, around 35 percent, are internet users. As per researches the yearly growth rate of internet users is highest in India around six million users join every month. Researchers expect the online shopping market in India to reach $15 billion by 2016 up from only $35 million in 2014. For example small business seller or dresses in Rajasthan, currently their reach is very constrained and growth is much limited. But by participating in these market places, this small business can now reach all over India. All the marketplaces have specific services for sellers that define on boarding, verification, tools to provide insights and fulfillment services. For attracting the customer Amazon India is doing a lot for this it has enlisted mom-and-pop store owners as partners in its delivery platform. In small villages and remote areas where few people have internet access, residents can go to their local store and use the owner's internet connection to browse and select goods from online Store.

Wenzhou Restaurants in Paris’s Chinatowns

Abstract In light of the large number of Chinese immigrants in Paris originally from the Wenzhou region in China’s Zhejiang Province, this research focuses on two case studies of Wenzhou restaurants situated in different Paris Chinatowns. It seeks to identify the ways in which the Wenzhou owners mark their presence in the Parisian linguistic landscape through the signage of their shopfronts and premises. By infusing existing multimodal analysis with ethnographic linguistic landscape analysis (ELLA), this study examines the ways in which two Wenzhou restaurateurs display their specific cultural and ethnic identity in the linguistic landscape. The analysis of the signage of their premises, combined with ethnographic interviews, unveils the restaurateurs’ strategies to enact their cultural and ethnic Wenzhou identity through their shopfront signs, menus and premise decorations, and how they distinguish themselves from their Chinese competitors.

Why Have All Western Internet Firms (WIFs) Failed in China? A Phenomenon-Based Study

This paper uses phenomenon based research to examine why all western internet firms (WIFs) have failed in China. In contrast to western firms from other sectors which have all achieved different levels of success, no WIFs, from search engines, internet content providers, social networks, to e-commerce and sharing economy platforms, have been able to beat their Chinese competitors and achieve sustainable operational success in China. Government censorship and control and cultural differences between China and the West are often cited as main reasons for such failures, but similar conditions existed in other countries, such as Indonesia or Saudi Arabia, which did not prevent WIFs such as Google from dominating over 90% of their search markets. Existing international business theory, the Ownership-Location-Internalisation (OLI) Eclectic Paradigm, failed to offer plausible explanations. Using comprehensive empirical evidence gathered from two rounds of elite interviewing, this paper identifies the key factors and the prevailing narratives from both the inside view and outside view to explain why all WIFs have failed in China. The theoretical and managerial implications are discussed. Future research should examine the key factors that led to the systematic failure of WIFs in China, particularly by testing propositions and developing new theoretical frameworks.

Managing Foreign R&D in China

OVERVIEW:China has become one of the most desired locations in which to do R&D. However, it has little innovation of its own, and intellectual property protection is weak. This raises questions: Is China R&D more hype than reality? Do cost advantages really outweigh the risk of losing technology to Chinese competitors? Lessons learned from managing R&D in China show that in order to avoid the typical pitfalls of managing R&D in a developing country, any China-based R&D must be part of an overall China strategy and must also be part of a global R&D effort.

Resorting to bilateralism: the EU, MERCOSUR, and the Strategic Partnership with Brazil

In 2007, the European Union (EU) launched a Strategic Partnership (SP) with Brazil despite its long-lasting interregional relationship with the Mercado Común del Sur (MERCOSUR). By singling out Brazil, the EU swung from the EU-MERCOSUR interregional negotiations on an Association Agreement (1999–2004) to bilateralism. In view of the EU’s increasing use of bilateralism, the article analyses why the EU shifted to this SP. Relying on elite interviews, it compares the interregional negotiations (1999–2004) with the bilateral talks with Brazil (since 2007). The EU switched venues from interregional to bilateral because it feared losing Brazil to its American and Chinese competitors. In Europe’s endeavour to prevent this loss, when interregional negotiations seemed fruitless because of MERCOSUR’s increasing fragmentation, the EU privileged Brazil as a strategic partner. Analysing this overlooked SP, the article looks at the – little studied – extra-regional factors that have rendered the EU’s commitment to regional integration vulnerable to bilateralism.

South–South? Culture Talk and Labour Relations at a Chinese‐owned Factory in Hungary

ABSTRACTIn 2011, a large Hungarian chemical factory was acquired by a Chinese competitor. The resulting encounter between Chinese managers and Hungarian staff — which took place in the context of a harsh retrenchment that has curtailed the powers of organized labour in Hungary — highlights the inadequacy of dichotomies such as North/South, East/West and socialist/capitalist. As with other corporate acquisitions in Europe, Chinese managers expected to ‘learn’ from ‘advanced Western management practices’; instead, they found what they interpreted as a backward, ‘socialist’ work culture in need of modernization. For their part, Hungarian staff feared the imposition of a culturally inappropriate ‘Asian labour discipline’, but have come to see at least some of the changes as part of a necessary modernization. ‘Asian’, ‘European’, ‘Western’ and ‘socialist’ are floating signifiers used by both Chinese and Hungarian staff at the factory in various, often contradictory ways to justify management choices, staff resistance or individual preferences. As a result of their analysis, the authors suggest that discussions about the impact of Chinese investment on labour practices should recognize a wider range of contexts, including the presence of precarious socioeconomic environments within the so‐called ‘advanced economies’.

Sovereign Wealth Fund investments in Europe as an instrument of Chinese energy policy

Chinese Sovereign Wealth Funds (SWFs) are new instruments of Chinese ‘Go Global’ strategy and the politics of maintaining raw materials and energy security. Europe has lured 60% of the total USD 27.3 billion invested by Chinese SWFs in the energy sector globally, which provokes the question as to how important SWF investments are in the political sense and what security concerns they bring. This paper is the first that presents a comprehensive picture of Chinese SWF investments in the European energy market and one of the very few papers about SWFs based on multiannual, comprehensive empirical data. The author argues that Chinese SWFs are different players on the energy market than private investors, could be potentially harmful for some European interests. By installing representatives on the company boards, China gains access to sensitive information that could be then transferred to Chinese competitors. Moreover, through its SWFs China could take control over energy companies or critical infrastructure and increase its political influence in European countries, making them more vulnerable to political pressure. Therefore, the European policy-makers should consider taking special steps to monitor and maybe limit Chinese SWFs expansion in the energy sector.

Supply chain management practices and intellectual property protection in China

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to investigate the strategy used by German Mittelstand companies to achieve a profitable business in China. It explores how those firms seek to reduce their risk of entry into this market.Design/methodology/approach– Survey data were gathered over the phone from individuals in the companies who were identified as knowledgeable contacts. Their responses were then analyzed using descriptive statistics and structural equation modeling.Findings– German Mittelstand firms that hire Chinese nationals in China obtain market knowledge and a higher return on investment than others. German managers’ efforts to understand the Chinese cultural norms increased the firm’s unwillingness to share information with others. This was probably because their concern about protecting their competitive secrets increased, so they shared less information with suppliers, which decreased their return on investment.Research limitations/implications– First, the small sample size limited the analysis. Second, there was low inter-rater reliability on multiple items, so these responses could not be analyzed. There is a need to further validate the survey, and obtain a larger sample to analyze alternative models.Practical implications– This suggests to the practitioner that while it may be relatively easy to start a manufacturing business in China, it requires great effort to manage their risk of losing corporate secrets to their competitors in China.Originality/value– This paper provides a unique set of data from practicing managers about the risks and gains from doing business in China. This data can be of use to both researchers and to practitioners and it provides a foundation to examine how the risk of losing proprietary knowledge to Chinese competitors affects business.

EU producers at the mercy of Chinese competitors?

Like any other WTO member the EU is entitled to use antidumping measures to protect its market from certain imports in the case of unfair competition. As far as China is concerned, the EU has extensively been using the 'analogue country' method for calculation of anti-dumping margin, as a method applicable for non-market economies, which enabled it to protect domestic producers from low Chinese prices. However, on 16th December 2016 this country will be granted a full market economy status within the WTO, as enshrined in Article 15 (d) of the China's Accession Protocol. This effectively means that the EU will not be able to charge such a high anti-dumping duty to Chinese products and shield domestic industry from a fierce competition. This article argues that the EU treatment of Chinese exporters was based on trade protectionism, and that, due to the forced change in December 2016, the internal market will face danger after China is granted a full market economy status.

Performance and strategic changes of SMEs in the Korean electronic parts industry: a dynamic strategic group approach

This study empirically examines the patterns and performance consequences of strategic changes of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in response to environmental changes based on longitudinal data from 102 Korean electronic parts SMEs from 1990 to 2001. The dynamic analysis of strategic groups in the Korean electronic parts SMEs shows that four to five different strategic patterns (subcontractor, production-focus, market-focus, innovator, and market-diversified groups) with significant performance differences emerged depending on the period. For instance, the innovator group outperformed the subcontractor group in terms of return on sales. The production-focus group (which exhibited a relatively higher performance level in the early 1990s) gradually deteriorated in profitability in the late 1990s. Subsequently, a substantial number of SMEs (25% of sample firms on average) have attempted to shift their strategic configurations with different performance consequences. These results imply that given the rapid technological development in the industry and changes in the global production network with the emergence of Chinese competitors, Korean SMEs should focus on technological innovations to maintain their competitive position by relentlessly enhancing their technological development capabilities rather than production capabilities.

Do Local Institutions Affect All Foreign Investors in the Same Way? Evidence from the Interwar Chinese Textile Industry

This article analyzes the impact of employment institutions on Japanese-, British-, and Chinese-owned textile firms in China during the 1920s and 1930s. Despite Britain's domestic position as a world productivity leader, Japanese firms enjoyed a 70 percent productivity advantage over both British and Chinese competitors. The divergent performance of Japanese and British investments in China is explained by differences in management practice. Japanese firms had domestic experience with employment institutions similar to China's and applied labor management strategies that functioned well under these institutions. British firms lacked the institutional experience necessary to adapt management strategies to Chinese institutions.

Culture Determines Business Models: Analyzing Home Depot's Failure Case in China for International Retailers from a Communication Perspective

AbstractThis article is a result of a longitudinal case study regarding Home Depot's operation in China. From 2006 to 2011, the author conducted 37 in‐depth interviews with Home Depot executives, managers, lawyers, employees, suppliers, and consumers, as well as its Western and Chinese competitors. These interviews generated 500+ pages of transcripts and field notes. Home Depot entered China in 2006 by acquiring 12 stores from a Chinese company, Home Way. However, by September 2012 all Home Depot stores in China had been closed.This interview‐based single‐case‐study research has these notable contributions. First, this research stresses the importance of host culture in creating a business model when an international retailer expands to a foreign country. Second, the research develops a new Host Culture Analysis Framework: CELM (host Culture, business Environment, target consumer Lifestyle, and target consumer Mentality). Third, by applying the CELM framework to the Chinese market, this research suggests that Home Depot could have replaced its ineffective DIY (Do‐It‐Yourself) model with the new DIFM (Do‐It‐for‐Me) business model for China. Fourth, this article proposes a new urban boutique store (UBS) retail format for international retailers entering emerging markets. Finally, this research shows that in‐depth interview is a solid research method to be applied to case studies, for the discovery of deeper reasons of international expansion failures. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.